I don't think so. I have a Win 8 system set up in the shop for people to play with and frankly it don't take long on a non touchscreen desktop for those that play with Win 8 to go "Eeew!" and then start looking at the Win 7 units. The movements MSFT expects you to make would be perfectly natural...if its a tablet sitting in your lap, but on a desktop with a mouse? NOT natural, it feels wonky and weird and wrong.

So I don't think a number change will do much in the way of sales, as TFA shows even those that use it go "eeew!" and want Win 7 by over half. I can tell you that here in the shop I've never seen that kind of negative reaction, even Windows Vista they liked the basic look and feel, it was when one of the numerous bugs bit them in the ass or that damned UAC slapped them in the face a couple of dozen times they hated it. With Win 8 I can see within 3 minutes they just don't like Metro, its just not a desktop UI.

Microsoft know Windows 8 will be a flop, but it's deliberate. They've finally realized that the second iteration (ME, Vista) has been a failure with corporate uptake especially low. This gives them space to experiment because it can't have much affect on low sales anyway.

By the time Windows 9 rolls around, they can keep what people liked about 8 and ditch the crap. This was the same transition in Vista to Windows 7. Suddenly Windows 9 will be the most amazing thing ever. If you're used to being kicked in the balls, being punched in the face isn't so bad.

Insightful, really? Microsoft deliberately try to fail with every other iteration of Windows. Right.

You can take each fuck-up individually. ME was an attempt to get away from what they knew was bad, but failed due to incompetence. Vista was a necessary evil to move developers away from XP and doing bad things like shitting all over the filesystem and installing millions of random shell extensions. UAC was deliberately designed to piss users off so that developers would try their best to avoid activating it, and it worked as intended.

Besides which the "every other" idea falls down because 2000 was excellent and XP wasn't really that brilliant, especially before SP2.

As for Windows 8 it looks like the Metro stuff was ill thought out. It is still too early to tell if it will be a flop though.

Ya know I actually WISH this was true sadly, it would show careful planning and a choice to risk sales to innovate, but I honestly think you are wrong and here is why: MSFT is pushing like crazy for WinPhone and WinTab, which you aren't gonna purposely throw a flop and have that name brand tied to a product you really want to sell. It would be like selling "The new Edsel" or how when I ask someone which OS they have if they say Vista I automatically say "I'm sorry". its tying the label of lemon around your product.

Instead, and this is the pathetic and sad part, what I think this is is Ballmer's and Sinofsky's "Hail Mary" pass. They know that with the price of Android units falling and that with Android and iOS having so much market share if they don't get something, ANYTHING out there right NOW NOW NOW that Windows is gonna be as dead as BeOS in the mobile space. Add to that the facts that the PC market is mature with machines so insanely overpowered compared to what the users actually do with them they don't replace until they break while ARM is gonna through a MHz war just like X86 did you can see why Ballmer and Sinofsky is so desperate to get their product out there.

Here is where they screwed the pooch though: Win 8 X86. Oh I get WHY they bolted on Metro, they have hopes that by forcing WinPhone UI onto the desktop users they'll "Get used to it" and when the time comes to buy a phone ot tablet they'll choose WinPhone or WinTab. The problem? Cell phone UIs do NOT work well without touch, the movements one does with a touch device that sits in your hands, like turning the pages, is natural. With a vertical screen and a mouse? This is an UN-natural movement. Its like replacing a steering wheel in a car with a pair of motorcycle handlebars in the hopes people will buy more bikes, its just not a good fit.

Finally you don't shit a billion dollars down the toilet launching a product that you know stinks on ice, not when if all MSFT wanted was beta testing they can do that just fine now just by saying "Win 8 is free! Here ya go!" or even selling it for like $25 a pop downloads. When you have Windows 7 Home at $100 and Pro at $140 having a $25 Windows would sell a LOT of copies, beta or not. No the ONLY reason to push this into mainstream is as a backdoor to try to get users to take the WinPhone UI..is it gonna work? Seriously doubt it, its "Windows Frankenstein" with the flipping back and forth between Metro and desktop just irritating.

Here is the million dollar question. Just in in the hell was the focus group in testing Metro UI?!! I really want to know how they conducted research as to the market viability of this design. Did Windows 8 just skip Microsoft's R&D division all together and get fast-tracked to just development and marketing? This is an epic failure; and a sad one at that. I never thought in a million years to say it, but I will.

Microsoft know Windows 8 will be a flop, but it's deliberate. They've finally realized that the second iteration (ME, Vista) has been a failure with corporate uptake especially low. This gives them space to experiment because it can't have much affect on low sales anyway.

I can think of more than one time I have taken advantage of a bug and turned it into a feature. Always a bit dangerous in the event that they 'fix' the bug. I would imagine this why so much software inexplicably breaks with service packs (especially back in the nt4 through early xp days).

Likely it is true that there are few if any pieces of software that are 100% perfect, but there is a huge difference in *knowing* that you are going to put out a product that *IS* defective, and when you know what those defects are, and putting out a product that you have tried your best to suss out entirely and in good faith believe is going to work for your customers. While both groups may be perfectly willing to support the product, the second respects their customer base and the long-term relationship t

Not true, though it is imposable to prove a piece of code has no bugs there it is possible to verify that a subset of bugs do not exist within the code.

You failed programming didn't you. This type of programming is NOT impossible, but it is extremely time intensive. NASA's systems are example where there is a mathematical proof behind every piece of logic (hardware or software) to ensure things work as intended (read: no bugs). Why else would they still run on 40 yr old equipment? You don't run tests to verify it works as intended because you can easily miss tests that would reveal bugs, but if you create code that has a mathematical proof to it, you effectively already tested ALL possible test cases.

You can have perfectly written code in the program, but if your compiler has bugs (read: some part of its code that doesn't work right with the OS or processor instructions) you're screwed. NASA still uses 40 yr old equipment because they'd have to re-do/re-confirm all of their proofs if they upgrade to a new OS or hardware with a different instruction set.

GP is mostly referring to the custom assembly programming that is done, no compiler necessary - just a straight assembler that can be proven to generate the correct output for the given input. Any program in a higher level language than assembly cannot be guaranteed in such a manner.

However, NASA also uses a lot of Java and other stuff, so not everything is to that level

Windows 8 isn't so much buggy (at least not on microsofts end), it's just badly designed. Those are two different problems. Deliberately choosing something to behave stupidly isn't a bug.

Also, both of your examples (SEL4 and TeX) have no relationship to a full product. One is a single piece of the product that, as an isolated microkernel might be bug free, but is not a full OS, and the other is a typsetting specification. The core kernel in Windows 8 could be bug free or close thereto (I'll show some sympathy for compatibility with new hardware, but it would still be a bug).

Windows 8 is badly designed. There will inevitably be some bugs related to the new UI, UEFI, new hardware, etc. But those are easily at the level of satisfactory. The problem is that it's just hugely inconsistent in how it behaves. It still runs 7 or 8 year old directx 8 code fine. But it can't figure out if it's 'metro' or a desktop, which one it should be in when, or how to just produce a list of installed software that I can semi easily navigate. No, metro is not easy to navigate, it tries, and it makes sense for 'apps' but it fails for serious software that has both applications and documentation.

That seems to depend a lot on hardware. I have one laptop (my own) which is a 4 year old HP and the touch screen that works fine on vista doesn't behave at all on 8. But the work laptop everything seems to behave as expected.

My lingering suspicion this is a manufacturer problem not a microsoft problem. Though I could be proven wrong.

How does it make sense to push a buggy product out the door before it's ready? It only makes sense if you want the product to tank.

It depends on how buggy the product is, and how big you think that the first mover(or at least not-quite-as-tardy mover) advantage will be for the product in question.

Given that (relatively) seamless online patch delivery is now an expectation, shipping a product in the 'rough but usable' stage can work just fine, no matter how much the purists loath it(and, unfortunately for the purists, that now seems to be the mark of a good launch, with 'overtly broken' being a distinct option).

The thing that strikes me as somewhat insane about MS' Windows 8 push is not so much that it is on an aggressive timescale, they haven't released an OS that was properly baked out of the box in a significant number of versions; but that they seem to be pushing out Windows 8 more or less solely for the sake of 'metro' which really only makes sense on tablets and any other touch-focused quasi-PC oddities.

It would seem totally sensible if they were to rush Windows RT/Metro out the door so as to get Wintablets on the shelves by Christmas(it's not as though iOS or Android started as terribly finished products, and 'ship now, then iterate' seems to have done them minimal serious harm). What seems weird is tying that to a push for Win8 on normal desktops. Rushing out a product where you currently don't have one isn't ideal; but that's how the world goes. Rushing out an unfinished product with negative buzz in the face of a (now reasonably polished) product that your customers mostly like? That's weird.

And this isn't even like the 'XP 4 lyfe contrarians hate Vista/7 because it breaks their shitty software' problem that they had last time. IT departments have, mostly, worked it out and switched or are switching, and Win8 isn't, if you ignore the 'we shipped an entire separate shell because, uh, fuck you, that's why' part, nearly as much of an architectural break. It's just unpolished and offers nothing interesting to current Win7 users. With XP, at least, while the legacy investment was massive, XP legitimately sucked a lot and needed to go; it just wasn't going to be pretty getting there.

Those "touch based quasi-PC oddities" are set to sell at least 2x (some say 10x) more devices than PC's in the coming years. Apple sold more iOS devices in 2011 alone than all the Mac's they've ever sold combined.

The fact is, touch based devices WILL be the defacto way the vast majority of users will use to access a computing device, and it just makes sense to combine all those into a single OS with a single mode of operation.

The thing that strikes me as somewhat insane about MS' Windows 8 push is not so much that it is on an aggressive timescale, they haven't released an OS that was properly baked out of the box in a significant number of versions; but that they seem to be pushing out Windows 8 more or less solely for the sake of 'metro' which really only makes sense on tablets and any other touch-focused quasi-PC oddities.

Well yes, that's is exactly the point, Metro or ubiquitous computing. Microsoft is starting a transiti

He knows it is going to suck, but he realizes that more people will still buy it if you do it at the right time, as opposed to waiting until a slow sales period. One way or the other, it is going to get out to the general public that it sucks, so you might as well sell as many as you can before that information percolates out into the larger population.

Game publishers like EA will do the same stuff. If it is a choice between launching later, but being a bit more ready, and launching at Christmas but selli

Windows 8 isn't buggy... it's unfinished and unpolished. What is there works well.

The desktop and metro side by side experiences make you feel like Microsoft put a lot of effort into getting the system running fast, smooth, and seamless, and then forgot to do anything with the desktop, or bring over any of the options. I posted about this yesterday, but suffice to say, Windows 8 is really great in terms of technical prowess, but the UI is unfinished, unpolished, and jarring, to say the least. And this is coming from somebody who actually *likes* Windows.

Except that it's not really a buggy product. I use Windows 8 every day, and I have never encountered anything that I would attribute to a bug in the OS.

Sure, some of the drivers are still a little buggy, but those are the vendors responsibility. The same was true when Vista and 7 and XP and 2000 were released. This improves drastically in the first few months.

No user gives a flying rats ass about the distinction between drivers and the operating system. It either works or it don't.

I also run Win8 at home. Just like I used the quick launch in XP and pinned all my apps to the taskbar in Win7, I have pinned all my apps in Win8 to the tasbar and stay in desktop view. I don't care for the simpler color scheme. It looks like windows is taking a step back to Win 3.1. Overall Win8 is not bad.
I agree that it is buggy but I blame most of that on NVidia. Tried their new Win8 drivers for my video card and they would crash all the time. Reverted back to the Win7 drivers and the crashing has sto

Well, "takes some getting used to" is normal for MS (it's one of the things I hate about their OSes and apps). But what are these "power features"? That does interest me, I don't mind relearning something to gain productivity, but most MS changes don't.

But what are these "power features"? That does interest me, I don't mind relearning something to gain productivity, but most MS changes don't.

I've been running Windows 8 for nearly a month now, courtesy of the VLSC agreement at work. The best answer I can give to this is as follows:

Hyper-V.

Look, Classic Shell is a necessity to prevent you from getting a voodoo doll of Steve Ballmer and using it as a pincushion...but Hyper-V seamlessly integrates virtual machines into your computer. If you're even the slightest bit familiar with VMWare's stuff at all, the UI for Hyper-V is simple to pick up. I've been using it to mess around with a lot of differen

So new users before the old, safe choice they're familiar with instead of something radically new and different. How does this surprise anyone?

Look, I had the same inclination when I switched from Windows 3.1 to Windows 95. I was one of those early adopters who bought it launch day and ran home and installed it. I, and many others, had the same feelings when the Ribbon debuted for MS Office. And yes, I thought the same thing trying out Windows 8. There is always that moment of "panic" when you realize you don't know where things are anymore like you did with the previous version.

But, each time, if you stick with it for a bit, you get familiar with new interface. You pick it up just as you did with the old one--and you even start to realize the advantages of the new layout versus the old. Sorry, Slashdot, but this is FUD and you're guilty of spreading it.

There are a number of things in Windows 8 that look like they WILL be a big improvement, but it will take some time to get used to the changes. If you think about it, we have had "explorer" since 1995, so for most people, a "start" button is very natural and anything different would take time to get used to. With that said, many people are really resisting the change in the UI, to the point where they are looking for excuses to NOT make the switch. Yes, Windows 7 is the best version of Windows to date

- I thought I'd miss aero / glass - but the new flat window chrome etc. has grown on me very quickly, clean and less distracting (takes you back to twm days).- Some bits of the UI and standard dialogs are much improved - new task manager is a _massive_ improvement for one- Explorer has an "up" button again. One of the biggest issues I had with Win7 sorted (no, "back" is _not_ the ****** same...)- It's faster and more responsive. Noticeably. The new start / metro screen even comes up faster than the old start menu on same hardware (and with same programs installed - in-place upgrade).

But biggest plus point for me so far is Hyper-V. Full ring -1 / bare-metal hypervisor performance on your local machine without the stress of (lack of) driver support for server 2008 on laptop / desktop hardware. It's a massive massive improvement on virtual PC or even VMWare workstation (now consigned to trash).[ and yes I know I can do that with Linux for free with Xen / KVM, but Linux isn't an install choice for the works machine, and we're comparing windows with windows here ].

Not so good: Metro apps, charms bar etc. - meh. But I can see some of it might be nice on a tablet if I had one.

This might be blasphemy, but IMO windows 7 is far more polished than *any* flavour of Linux.

If by "polished" you mean "pretty" and "shiny" I agree, W7 is much prettier and shinier than Linux. If, however, you mean stable, feature-rich and bug-free, no way. What takes three clicks in KDE takes ten in W7. W7 is far less useable and far less stable, although it's head and shoulders above previous OSes in stability.

I currently have three computers, one with kubuntu, one with WXP and one with W7. We'll ignore the WXP machine.

Maintenance -- Windows still lags badly. In W7 you get the update notification, and you have to download and install the updates (unless you use autoupdate, which I stopped after an XP update replaced a perfectly good network driver with a 100% nonfunctional one). Then you have to reboot the computer.

Kubuntu, one click and you're done. No reboots, no muss, no fuss.

When the Windows computer reboots you have to enter your password (even on a single-user machine in your house that you live alone in) and reopen all the apps and docs that were open before you booted. In Linux, if the power goes out, you can have set the OS to enter your password for you on bootup. The machine restarts, and your password is entered and all your apps and docs that were open before are open again. That, to my mind, is polish, and W7 lacks it.

If you add new hardware to your W7 box, it will detect it on startup and maybe (but not usually) find the right driver. More often you have to insert an install disk and run an installer.

Then, of course, you have to reboot after a bunch of UACs.

Linux? Start it up and the new hardware just works. No installation, no muss, no fuss, no reboots. It just works. That's MY idea of "polished" and by that criteria, Linux is far more polished. But if your criteria for "polished" is "pretty" than yes, W7 is prettier than any Linux distro. But far less functional and with far fewer features. I have yet to find a single feature in W7 that kubuntu lacks.

I find 8's new Metro UI to be genuinely worse for desktops. I gave it a chance, just like I did 7's new taskbar, but it has failed to win me over. It is not a good way for working with a desktop. My desktop is not a tablet, I do not use a touch screen. So a start menu replacer (Start 8 is my choice) gets installed.

Also I'm sorry but it is ugly. It is a step back looks wise. 7 looks pretty slick. All the desktop composition is put to good use making it look nifty. In 8, it is just ugly. The desktop composition is still there underneath, and is in fact even improved, but it is used to render a very ugly UI. Worse still, the UI changes make it more difficult to navigate, it is hard to tell if something is a window for a separate program, or just a window under the current one. They all look the same.

It's sad because technically, 8 is quite competent. It is very fast. Cakewalk found basically across the board improvements in Sonar (http://blog.cakewalk.com/windows-8-a-benchmark-for-music-production-applications/) and this is just their release software, not a special 8 build. So it looks like under the hood, 8 is a good OS. However its UI is truly a step back and the UI is the first thing most people notice.

It isn't a horrible OS, but it is worse than it should be, all on account of them wanting to try and use their desktop and server OS to push tablet sales.

Maybe it's the schizophrenic nature of Windows 8 which is problematic. This is something Windows never had before. Having two UIs can be rather confusing and you do need to learn both ways of performing simple tasks like printing, saving or opening a document.

I wasn't planning on upgrading to Windows 8. I have plenty of Windows 7 licenses (though maybe I should get one more just in case? Before they stop selling 7?) Anyway. I played around with some of the public trials and didn't like it much. Could you please let me know what you think the advantages are? I'm intrigued. When I first tried 7, I was instantly satisfied with the way the taskbar worked, etc. I was instantly sad that I was stuck on XP at work. I had the exact opposite feeling with 8. So what

I'm part of the minority (my impression, anyway) who thought the ribbon was a great improvement immediately. But this OS change doesn't appear to be a play to improve a desktop experience, it looks like a play to regain relevance a consumer market that has widened to include those who were not interested in desktop machines.

I think the misjudgment is that there are two markets - desktop and mobile/touch - that are being lumped into one. Design for both, dammit. 8 is going to be nice for tablets, I truly b

Microsoft has proved to be able to deliver high quality software products.Namely, the Office suite (especially Excel), the flight simulator and I think a few more.When the operating system evolution went past the plain old command line (aka DOS), then Microsoft has been successful only as long as it's been novelty.Apple did it far better as far as the UI is concerned.*BSD and Linux-based OSes are much better in the overall operation.So, Mr. Soft, get back to where you once belonged!

It just needs to get rid of the Metr... I mean Modern interface if you don't have a touch sensitive screen or at least give us the option of using a traditional menu interface. Just give us a revert to desktop & start menu and I'll be happy. On the other hand they've also trimmed quite a bit of fat and at some things it's a shed load faster.

I am using W8 prerelease in a work environment and it beats W7 on many aspects (I have a choice to work under XP/W7/W8 - daily system reloads for testing purpose) - speed for one. Search feature appears better but still cumbersome.
There are some quirks - closing/starting individual programs in multiple instances, the silly desktop interface. Guess it will be ironed out in final.

It appears to be basically a W7 with some improvements.From what I read it will sell for $ 60 or so.Definitely worth (IMO) getti

There's plenty of people on Win8 already. It does work, it is different (faster for one), people don't like change, and Windows has changed of course. If you don't like the metro UI don't use it. Where's the news here?

Unless I have a machine with 8gb of usable ram (and unless I do professional video editing or photo editing), for basic home and school work, I would still roll back to WindowsXP.I have been using XP since its first release, went through 3 different machine upgrade cycles, and I still find WindowsXP to be the simplest, easiest OS to use.(Don't get me stared on Ubuntu, which as of the latest release, won't even work with my video card without special boot parameters altering how it loads video memory)

Can't say I miss the start menu at all, haven't really noticed Metro being in the way or even there. Got 3 monitors, pinned my apps to the task bar, productivity is exactly the same as when I was on Win7 yesterday.

Time will tell I guess, but so far so good. I have no choice in running it as I own a computer shop and the general public are going to start coming in with problems at some point and I need to know how it all works!

I'll be leaving my home machines on Win7 for the foreseeable future. Kids n gi

There was some good news for Microsoft from the survey though, as the Windows 8-based Microsoft Surface was more popular than Android tablets and the iPad. Around 35 percent of respondents said the Surface would be their tablet of choice.

Right. Around 35% of Microsoft fanbois on a Microsoft fanboi site would prefer Surface to Android of I pad, and that's good news for Microsoft? If they can't get more than 35% of their own fanbois on board, it's dead.

The notion that many or even most users of a new and largely untested (insert any-fracking-thing here) would prefer the one they were using and were comfortable with previously over this new and unfamiliar experience, is nothing short of blatantly obvious. Likewise, the notion that any new complex system is going to be completely perfect on day-one of release is utterly ludicrous. Crud... I'm a Mac user, and I'm not in the slightest surprised to hear that W8 users might want to go back to W7, any more then I would be surprised when any given Windows user who has migrated to a Mac expresses certain regrets over that move, now and then. Growing pains always suck... and in the case of W8, there's not really any seasoned users around, who might be able to help navigate through this new territory.

The real test of W8 will be to conduct the same type of survey a year or two from now, to see if switchers who have been using it for awhile still want to go back. Vista very (in)famously failed that test, which is what kept XP around for so long... but trying to conduct such a test now, on W8 early adopters is basically the same thing as testing to see if water is still wet.

Was keep the old Windows 7 desktop and make switching to Metro seamless. OS X can gracefully switch to full screen apps. Why can't Windows 8 just gracefully slide in a Metro app into full screen mode?

I'll tell you why. Because Microsoft is like a jack booted thug who sees Steve Jobs compelling people to accept a new UI and completely misses the Steve Jobs-era quality control and salesmanship for the authority he has in the eyes of the customer. Therefore they think "if Steve Jobs can make them like it, anyo

And just extended the Windows 7 shell so it had a "Tablet" mode with some sort of auto-detection, they might have kept the desktop people happy AND the tablet crowd happy - just like the actual users suggested on the Windows forums, again and again and again....

Just yesterday I installed the final version of Windows 8 from DreamSpark to a netbook just for fun. The result? It actually ran smooth, but none of the Metro apps could be run due to the 1024x600 resolution. Not a big loss, but I was slightly surprised that they actually completely skipped us netbook-connoisseurs.

As a sidenote, it was funny how in W8 many of the texts have been changed to a casual, "user-friendly" style. "While we set up your stuff, please enjoy a pizza. Meanwhile we'll send some info to Microsoft, but you can change this later."

Making UI uniform across all devices is a risky strategy. If consumers, familiar with Windows 7 & XP, hate Windows 8, how are they going to be sold Microsoft's new phone on the strength "it's the same as our new PC desktop" ?

Most of what I see in Windows 8 is a touch screen-centric interface. If you have a tradition desktop with a keyboard and mouse, it looks like a Pre-School, Fisher-Price interface.

Microsoft sees tablets and touch-screen devices as being the way of the future and desktop PC not shipping the their previous volumes. This may be true, but dumbing down the PC even more to accommodate touch-screens is not the way forward.

It may be true that mobile touch-screen devices are the way of the future but, desktop/laptop systems are never going away (or at least, not for a very long time). Mobile devices are great for web browsing, short texting and reading emails but for productivity applications, you need a desktop. In other words, if you want to author Word Documents, create web pages, create PowerPoint Presentations, create and test code for applications (including mobile apps), do graphic design, etc, you need a desktop system. Also, what works for touchscreen, on-the-go devices doesn't necessarily work for a laptop/desktop. I guess Microsoft lost sight of this when they tried to create one operating system to rule them all.

You know what this really means folk? Microsoft actually succeeded. If you can get 47% (or just shy of half) of users to prefer a new completely radical UI experience. You've done something really really right. As I'd expect 80% to prefer that which they're familiar with and have used since 1995.

Let's use our brains, and look at this data for what it really is. A measure of a decent amount of success. 50/50 on a new experience is good. Heck, probably didn't have that much higher support when XP or Vista came out. And those were incremental changes.

It seems that everyone here hasn't actually read the article (yourself included). First, to just address your post while 53% answered their favorite Windows OS was Windows 7, only 25% answered that their favorite was Windows 8, with the other 25% answering Windows XP or other.

However, when asked "Which OS have you used before" only 26% answered they've even used Windows 8. This is not even a survey of only windows 8 users. 74% of the people answering this survey have not even used Windows 8. This is even

What, Creative Labs can't release a decent driver for a new version of Windows? There is NOTHING new there since they couldn't come up with a decent driver for Windows XP for the SB Live cards, and actually drove me and many others away. Creative has NEVER been good about drivers.

Or... maybe someone else should come up with a new better OS and get people to try it? KDE is a joke. Pretty much every Linux GUI is a joke. MacOS is actually pretty nice these days (though pre-10 it was a joke too), but the whole trying to be a walled garden thing is a bit of a turnoff. Ok, yes, the more of a joke Windows becomes (and Win8 is a pretty big joke too), the more people might feel like trying some flavor of Linux, as it could hardly be -less- useable... but still. Anti-trust commissions of vari